The Assembly house made a mistake in swapping two resistors, which resulted in dim glowing of one of the 7 segements of the 7 Segment LED Display. We now have to do swap it back on all 50 boards.

I will let you guess the correct position of R14 and R9 in the picture above.

This is the section of the affected circuit.

The good news is that these boards are built with LX9 ( 144 Pins) and not the LX4 as initially suggested on Kickstarter.

Yesterday ( on 4/21/2016) we shipped 7 Spartixed to the US backers who wanted only the Spartixed ( and not the programmer). These should work well with Xilinx Platform Cable ( including the ability to program the in built Flash).

We then moved on to test the Board and the ability to program the board using the low cost Reference Designer's USB programmer - XIFT1. It worked wonderfully and we were able to program the Xilinx board using XC3SPROG.EXE. The

Everything worked fine till we started trying to program the Flash using XC3SPROG.EXE. It turned out that XC3SPROG.EXE will not recognize Winbond W25Q16DVSSIG that was populated on our board. We then replaced the Flash with Macronix Part No MX25L6445EM2I-10G and it worked like charm.

With this we have the Spartixed and the low cost USB programmer both verified. We are now all set to start shipping the boards early next week when the USB programmer arrives. We will have test these before we can say anything with certainty.

We will be publishing more details about the project and more details need to be placed as the boards ship.

Update 4/23/2016

While the Macronix Part No MX25L6445EM2I-10G will work with XC3SPROG, Xilinx iMPACT is not happy with it. The MX25L6445 is not listed as one of the SPI Flashes supported in its list. Fortunately there seem to be a work around mentioned here . Basically you need to create and set environment variable XIL_IMPACT_SKIPCODECHECK to 1 in your computer and choose N25Q64 as the device fixes it.

A better option could be to use a Flash device that is supported in iMPACT as well as XC3SPROG. The iMPACT tool lists following 64 MBit flashes that needs to be tried.

On March 30, 2016, the Spartan 6 Evaluation board, nicknamed Spartixed Successfully raised $2,991 USD with 40 backers. We thank all backers who supported this board. Our sincere apology for not posting update on this project.

We were busy with fulfilling the earlier hubpixed project ( also on kickstarter) that kept us busy for a while. It is almost complete and gives us some time to work on the Spartixed.

50 Spartixed Boards Arrived

The good news is that we have 50 manufactured Spartixed boards in hands that arrived couple of days ago. We tested it and it looks nice. In the coming days all the boards will be tested and packaged for shipping.

We will also start shipping it soon. It will be shipped first to the backers who have backed only the Spartixed and not the USB programmer. We assume that you already have a programmer - something like Xilinx USB Parallel Cable. If you are a kickstarter backer and did not back for the USB programmer, and you wish to have one, please send a message through kickstarter.

USB Programmer Ordered for manufacturing

The USB programmer was ordered for manufacturing on Monday, 4/4/2016 and they take 10 to 12 days to manufacturer. Add three days of shipping to it and we are looking for a dock date of around April 20 2016. Once the USB programmer arrives, it will be tested and the shipping should start right after that. Expect to receive the Spartixed and the USB programmer before the end of this month.

The hubpixed has been shipped to all the US Backers. By now all the US backers should have received it. We have generally good feeback from those who have used it. Mark uploaded the following picture on flicker .

This is Mark's comment

Added a "hubpixed" four port USB hub to the piZero I use as a status projector... makes it easier to keep the wifi antenna vertical, when it's not hooked up through an adapter cable. (Assembly is no-fuss: four screws, pogo pins on the underside of the hub connect to test-pads on the underside of the piZero.) A solid approach, especially for a system I wasn't going to bother putting into a case anyway...

I hope others will also share their experience as well.

The international shipping is unfortunately delayed. We managed to find someone in UK who is going to deliver it locally in UK. We also found a source that can ship locally in Canada. For other countries, including EU, we do not have a distribution in place.

To complicate the matter a little more, we are close to out of stock and replenishment stock that was supposed to arrive by now has been delayed and is now expected to be in stock by April 13, and this is when the International shipping will resume.

We again apologize to everyone outside US for the delay. But it allowed us to learn about the supply chain and we hope to be better prepared for our next project on kickstarter.